The Rational Egoist

We went to war with Iraq, we removed a dictator from power and removed one out of many threats to the United States (and as a secondary consequence, freed the Iraqi people). In my opinion, Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of the United States, but rather a potential threat.

All dictatorships, by their very nature, pose a threat to the security of the free nations of the world. As I indicated in my July 11th post, North Korea must be stopped:

Every dictatorship, by its very nature, must survive by looting others. The government of a dictatorship does not have the means to produce anything, so it must take money from its citizens in order to fund its operations. This entails the initiation of force against the citizens under this dictatorship. The force involves making citizens physically unable to reap the full benefits of their own labor, which as a result, causes the individual to be unable to fully use their mind to the extent that they are physically forced. An individual is unable to use their mind when they are forced because of the very nature of the human mind. The human mind is volitional, which means, one must choose to think or not to think. A human being can not choose between two or more alternatives when they are forced to act on one of those alternatives.

Freedom is an essential requirement of an individual’s survival, and therefore the survival of a society as well. To the extent that a society is not free, that society will suffer the consequences of not being able to survive. For an indvidual, not being able to use his own mind means that he will be unable to produce the conditions required by his nature as a human being in order to survive. Because of this fact, in a dictatorship, where there is little or no freedom, the conditions of the dictatorship will increasingly worsen.

The only way for a dictatorship to survive is to loot from either its own citizens or the citizens of other countries. One of the prime methods of doing so, besides appealing to altruism, is threatening the use of force and essentially extorting money, supplies, and sanction, from free nations. The only way for a dictatorship to be able to do so however is by amassing enough military power to be able to make their threat of force credible. The standard way of doing so in the past was to amass a large military and engage in a war with a large number of soldiers. However, these days are past. Now, instead of attempting to amass such a large military (which is no easy task), a dictatorship can develop weapons of mass destruction which are much more persuasive as a credible threat, especially nuclear weapons. Once a dictatorship has obtained these weapons of mass destruction, they can threaten the use of these weapons and offer, in exchange, the promise that they will not use the weapons just so long as certain free countries (such as the U.S.) continue to provide them with money, supplies, and the promise that they will not oppose their regime. (see the current situation with the U.S. and North Korea for evidence of this)

This means that dictators, with weapons of mass destruction, will be able to maintain their power by extorting funds from free nations through the threat of force, free nations will ignore the threat and suffer the consequences (many deaths), or free nations will attempt to eliminate the threat (which would result in many deaths of soldiers and an increased number of soldier deaths due to the possibility of weapons of mass destruction being used.)

It is not a question of if dictators will threaten the use of weapons of mass destruction but rather of when. The when is determined by many factors such as size of the country, length of time the dictatorship has been in power, resources the country possesses which can be looted by the dictatorship, etc. However, at some point in the life of a dictatorship, they must find an additional source for their looting besides the people, otherwise this source would be sucked dry. If they do not get this looting source from the veil of altruism, they will inevitably turn towards getting what they need through forcing other citizens outside their country. Evidence of this can be seen across time. It is no coincidence that the biggest dictatorships in our world’s history all attempted to amass the largest armies and military power in the world.

Does this mean that World War III is inevitable, in which the outcome will be decided by chemical, biological, or even nuclear war? No, it does not have to be that way. We have the power NOW to eliminate those regimes which are attempting to amass large military power through weapons of mass destruction. We have the power NOW to prevent World War III. In order to do so, we must stop funding dictatorships, ALL dictatorships. This is done in two ways. First, we stop providing dictatorships with aid either for the government itself or for its citizens. As sad as the situation of citizens under a dictatorship may be, giving them aid allows the dictatorship to concentrate on building its weapons rather than feeding its people. If no aid were to be given to the citizens of a dictatorship, either more money would have to be spent on feeding the people (which means less money on weapons) or the people would revolt against the dictatorship if they were starving. Second, we must not allow any dictatorship to achieve a weapons of mass destruction program, especially, nuclear weapons. This means eliminating the weapons program of specific countries BEFORE they get any weapons of mass destruction.

This is exactly what we did with the recent war with Iraq. We removed a potential threat and the potential ability for Saddam Hussein to extort money, power, and sanction from the countries of the world. Whether or not Saddam Hussein had a fully developed weapons program or a budding one is irrelevant. What is relevant was that he was attemping ANY weapons program at all, and this is incontrovertible, as seen over the past 12 years. All of this talk now about exaggerating the case for war and Bush and Blair lying to the world, is utter nonsense. I do not believe that anyone in the Bush administration perceived Iraq to be an “imminent threat.” And I do not believe that Iraq was an imminent threat. But shouldn’t that be a great thing? There are so few countries that pose an “imminent threat” to U.S. security, and now, instead of looking only for “imminent threats” we can eliminate all threats before they balloon into imminent threats.

Does this mean that we should attack all of the dictatorships in the world? No, absolutely not. All that is needed to end the vast majority of the dictatorships in our world is for the free nations to stop funding them. Most dictatorships, without the support of world aid under the veil of altruism would collapse within a matter of years. In those few situations where the country of the dictatorship has a vast resource to loot, such as the Middle East and the oil resources, the United States should use force where it is necessary to protect the interests of the United States by preventing the ability for dictators to extort money from us, which is exactly what we did in Iraq.